The Bible onscreen in the new millennium

New heart and new spirit

Wickham Clayton

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781526136572
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526136596
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Películas y vídeos

The remarkable commercial success of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ in 2004 came as a surprise to the Hollywood establishment, particularly considering the film's failure to find production funding through a major studio. Since then the Biblical epic, long thought dead in terms of mainstream marketability, has become a viable product. This collection examines the new wave of the genre, which includes such varied examples as Darren Aronofsky's Noah (2014) and Ridley Scott's Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014), along with the telenovelas of Latin America. Such texts follow previous traditions while appearing distinct both stylistically and thematically from the Biblical epic in its prime, making academic consideration timely and relevant. Featuring contributions from such scholars as Mikel J. Koven, Andrew B. R. Elliott and Martin Stollery, and a preface from Adele Reinhartz, the book will be of interest to students and scholars of film, television and religion.

Part I

Producing biblical film and television

1

Battles over the biblical epic: Hollywood, Christians and the American Culture Wars

Karen Patricia Heath

The acts against this film started early. As soon as I announced I was doing it, it was ‘This is a dangerous thing.’ There is vehement anti-Christian sentiment out there, and they don’t want it. It’s vicious. I mean, I think we’re just a little part of it, we’re just the meat in the sandwich here. There’s huge things out there, and they’re belting it out – we don’t see this stuff. Imagine: There’s a huge war raging, and it’s over us! This is the weird thing. For some reason, we’re important in this thing. I don’t understand it. We’re a bunch of dickheads and idiots and failures and creeps. But we’re called to the divine, we’re called to be better than our nature would have us be. And those big realms that are warring and battling are going to manifest themselves very clearly, seemingly without reason, here – a realm that we can see. And you stick your head up and you get knocked. (Gibson quoted in Boyer 2003)

Mel Gibson’s emotional commentary on the significance of his biblical epic, the self-financed The Passion of the Christ (2004), followed on the heels of a major public controversy that saw numerous media attacks on his film as anti-Semitic, excessively violent, and historically and biblically inaccurate. Gibson’s thoughts were published on 15 September 2003 in a long and not entirely unfriendly article entitled ‘The Jesus War’, penned by Peter J. Boyer, a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine. Through the machinations of a friend in the industry, Boyer had been invited to attend a private screening of Gibson’s unfinished work, followed by several other opportunities to watch Gibson in action (2003).

In theological terms, Gibson self-identifies as a traditionalist who seeks to restore the older customs and rites of the Catholic Church, prior to the landmark reforms of Vatican II (for instance, Gibson holds to the Latin Mass, rather than the use of vernacular languages). In a political sense, Gibson might best be defined as a staunch conservative who believes that debates over Passion represent only one front in a broader Culture War, i.e. an ideological battle between, in his view, a (fundamentally wrong) secular left, and a morally correct right.

Gibson sought to conceptualise the American cultural landscape in the early 2000s when he offered a heartfelt description of the ‘huge war raging’ over his film. Although in this interview, Gibson did not specifically use the phrase ‘Culture War’ or ‘Culture Wars’, clearly, the war he referenced was a cultural one of ‘big realms that are … battling’ (quoted in Boyer 2003). Gibson’s comments were very similar to those of a once-insurgent candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, Patrick J. Buchanan, who on 17 August 1992 spoke to the Republican National Convention of ‘a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America … a cultural war’ (Buchanan 1992).

De facto, Gibson echoed Buchanan’s rhetoric, as he offered textbook Culture Wars commentary on the alleged ‘anti-Christian sentiment out there’ that he believed sought to bring his project to a grinding halt. Gibson did not define the villain of the piece, but the antagonistic ‘they’, the opposing forces he thought he saw, conceivably included the Hollywood film industry itself (who had failed to provide financial backing for the film in the first place), the mainstream media (who, to his mind, were now taking unwarranted shots at the piece) and, potentially, anyone else who found the project in some way problematic. Gibson’s analysis of the rationale behind various ‘acts against this film’ thus sits well with that of other conservative cultural critics, such as Michael Medved, who has consistently argued that Hollywood (and, to a degree, the mainstream media itself) represents a liberal aesthetic elite, and that something must be done about this situation (1992).

Since the 1990s, Hollywood’s biblical epics, both classic and modern, have proved a topic of considerable debate for film scholars: indeed, much has been written on the subject of how best to define and methodologically approach this particular type of film. On one matter though, there appears to be an implicit scholarly consensus, namely that the biblical epic is somehow inextricably wrapped up with the functioning of the Culture Wars, and that Hollywood and religion are on opposite sides of an ideological fence. Meanwhile, scholars of the broader Culture Wars have tended to overlook film (Hunter 1991) with the exception of occasional discussion of Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) (Hartman 2015: 183–9).

This chapter, written in late 2018, represents an initial attempt to question the Culture Wars assumptions of scholars of American religion and film, and to redirect the work of Culture Wars scholars into filmic directions. It was motivated initially by my desire to make sense of the seeming resurgence of the biblical epic post-Passion, and by my interest in what I perceive to be a critically important genre in the recent film history of the United States. The resultant piece is not comprehensive, for my research is still in the early stages, but even so, it seems sensible to present my ideas now in order to encourage further debate and analysis.

The chapter begins by sketching out the history of the biblical epic and its relationship to moral and cultural debates in the twentieth century United States. It then moves on to examine whether the key target audience for the modern biblical epic in the twenty-first century (i.e. committed Christian viewers) conceive of themselves as ideologically opposed to Hollywood or not. In so doing, the chapter shows that controversies over the biblical epic were strangely absent during the height of Culture Wars debates, notably in the 1920s, the mid-to-late 1960s and the late 1980s and into the 1990s. It also suggests that for many American Christians in the mid-2000s and into the 2010s, Culture Wars battles are not central to their enjoyment or otherwise of specific films. The chapter concludes that in the case of the modern biblical epic at least, a Culture Wars lens may actually obscure more than it reveals.

Pre-Passion Culture Wars: Hollywood and the biblical epic in the twentieth century

In order to test the usefulness of Gibson’s conception of Passion as a cultural battleground, and of Hollywood as a leftward-leaning Culture Wars actor, it is important to place this film in historical context, and to explore the status, success and popularity of the biblical epic in the twentieth century. If Gibson and Medved are correct, we might expect to see clear-cut evidence of a liberal Hollywood elite producing films that were antagonistic to American viewers, particularly those of a conservative, traditionalist or rightward-leaning religious bent. So too, if Culture Wars theories are correct, we should see obvious flash points over the biblical epic during those years when the United States experienced quite virulent cultural battles – namely the 1920s, the mid-to-late 1960s and the period from the late 1980s to the early 1990s. But what we actually see is more complex, and considerably more interesting.

From the very earliest days of the American cinema, films with expressly Christian content appealed to moviegoers. Although the first landmark silent classic was arguably Birth of a Nation (1915), D. W. Griffith had turned his hand to the Bible the year before, with Judith of Bethulia (1914). It was not until the 1920s, though, that the production of biblical epics really took off. This decade saw the origins of a nascent modern American conservatism, yet it also witnessed the liberalisation of American popular culture and progressive change for many women. Notable morality battles included those over domestic issues such as education, and also immigration. Film was affected by these morality debates too, as a series of Hollywood scandals led many Christians and other religious groups to view the nation’s foremost producer of films as a purveyor of immorality, indecency and sexual perversion, to the extent that by 1930, the major studios banded together to self-regulate the industry, with the creation of William Hays’ Production Code Office that applied moral guidelines to film.

At first glance, this self-censorship would seem to indicate the veracity of claims such as those by Medved that the Hollywood ‘dream factory’ might be better termed a ‘poison factory’ (1992: 3). And yet the 1920s saw the production of several now-classic Hollywood biblical epics – such as Cecil B. DeMille’s first The Ten Commandments (1923) and also The King of Kings (1927). These films were hugely popular with domestic audiences, did very well at the box office and, in some cases, reportedly prompted religious conversions. Although Hollywood was afflicted by early Culture Wars in the 1920s, then, it was far from obvious that the film industry itself acted as a distinctive liberal elite, nor that there existed a clear-cut ideological divide between those groups on the right, and those on the left, who worried about the content and moral impact of Hollywood films.

The Great Depression and Second World War were undoubtedly challenging fiscal times for expensive productions, but the biblical epic persisted throughout the 1930s, for instance with DeMille’s Sign of the Cross (1932). The height of the classic biblical epic was the late 1940s and 1950s, however, with DeMille’s Samson and Delilah (1949), followed by, amongst others, Mervyn LeRoy’s Quo Vadis (1951), DeMille’s second and more famous The Ten Commandments (1956) and William Wyler’s Ben-Hur (1959).

If we fast-forward to the mid-1960s, the second key decade of Culture Wars upheavals, these were turbulent years that saw a radical, youthful generation challenge the traditional values of an older one. Hollywood was not inoculated against these cultural maelstroms, yet it is still far from obvious that debates over the 1960s biblical epic fit easily within a conservative framework of Hollywood as a bastion of the left, or indeed of significant Culture Wars-inspired attacks on the genre at the grassroots. Hollywood still produced big-budget biblical films in this decade, such as Nicholas Ray’s King of Kings (1961) and George Stevens’ The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), but now these movies were flops at the box office.

As the scholars of Hollywood film, Bruce Babington and Peter William Evans, have noted in their seminal Biblical Epics, the notion of an ‘epic’ itself pertains to the rare, expensive and well publicised. More than other genres, the epic is ‘highly vulnerable to major shifts of the determinants of production’, including financial pressures (1993: 6). The box office failures of the 1960s biblical epic thus merely foreshadowed the decline of big-budget filmmaking per se, for other kinds of epics, notably historical ones, were also in trouble, such as Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra (1963) (Hall and Neale 2010: 177–95). The problem for the biblical epic in the 1960s was economic in nature, not moral: Hollywood interest in the genre declined not due to value-driven debates, but because profits evaporated.

That said, the biblical epic was not entirely immune to changing ideas about censorship in the 1960s. The introduction of a new voluntary ratings system for the industry in 1968, under the auspices of the Motion Picture Association of America, is a case in point here. Sometimes lusty biblical tales, particularly from the Old Testament, had long been one of the key ways for audiences, both mainstream and religious alike, to enjoy films with sometimes quite graphic scenes of sex and violence (Babington and Evans 1993: 8). But once these restrictions were removed, the stage was set for a New Hollywood, one that produced films that appealed to a younger, counter-cultural generation with little interest in the Bible. Now the film industry turned to movies that, in the views of some Christians, undermined traditional family values, such as Dennis Hopper’s focus on drug-taking and the communal hippie lifestyle in Easy Rider (1969). Yet this did not mean that faith-based audiences simply dried up, nor that there was a clear-cut Culture War between conservatives and traditionalists on the one hand, and liberals or progressives on the other. The 1960s were a period of high Culture Wars over other issues, but at no point did moral battles engulf the biblical epic, nor did the Hollywood film industry as a whole conceive of itself as a censoring, liberal elite. In short, there was no war for the soul of Hollywood.

Although the world of Christian filmmaking experienced significant growth in the 1970s, this was more to do with the declining economic viability of big-budget filmmaking in general, than Hollywood specifically ignoring Christian audiences or deliberately making films that somehow sought to persecute those of faith. In the realm of Christian filmmaking, psychologist James Dobson’s series Focus on the Family (1978) helped to popularise his biblically inspired views on childrearing and familial and marital relations, whilst Franky Schaeffer, alongside his fat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Producing biblical film and television
• Part II Modern narratives and contexts in adapting the Bible
• Part III Critical readings and receptions
• Part IV Culture and representation
• Filmography
• Index